Everything You Need To Know About Patient Experience

One percent believes the earth is flat—“I put a post in a hole and adjusted it until it was level. That means the earth is flat.”

Eighty-to ninety percent of hospitals CEOs believe improving patient experience is one of their top three objectives in the next three to five years.

I can believe the chair next to me will support my weight, but unless I actually sit in the chair merely believing is not worth anything.

Hospitals would have us believe that what is important to consumers of healthcare is that the product—healthcare—is the same as the process of interacting with it or buying it are one in the same, or their belief that process has nothing to do with it.

Take flying for example. Airlines want us to focus on the product, getting us from Point A to Point B. They do not want us to focus on the fact that they will charge you if you use your flotation device, your flight will be late, and that they have packed more people into the plane than were in your high school.

My hospital has a website, let’s move on.

The US economy has developed a dependence on digital performance, including the twenty percent tied to healthcare. Healthcare, hospitals in particular, have developed a digital illiteracy, independence, or naive indifference on all things digital and on all things related to process.

Believing that because your hospital has a website means it understands the impact the digital world should play in its business model is like believing that reading Oliver Swift gives you keen insight into what it is like to be an orphan.

The C-Suite needs to understand that technology is not the same as digital; in fact they have little in common. In a hospital technology equates to cost—to back-office functions, to supply-chain, to why ICD-10 may be a disaster, and how it is possible to spend three hundred million dollars on EHR and see productivity take a nose-dive.

Digital is different. It is not some emergent trend. Please do not stop reading here even though many will disagree with what follows. Digital is Amazon and eBay, but not in the way most people think about them. It has nothing to do with CDs, movies, or laptops. It has nothing to do with what they sell or the price at which it is sold. It has everything to do with the process by which customers act with what is being sold.

The process, the processes are everything. They are everything that the processes within a hospital are not, everything that the health exchange is not. The processes are:

Intuitive

Easy

And the processes are intuitive and easy because they were designed to be that way. We are not talking about tweaking things.

The less you understand about the importance of having a remarkable digital presence the less likely you are to have one. Hospital executives may understand it least of all. The poorer your understanding, the poorer the delivery of your product is, and the poorer its perception is in the marketplace.

And to make a bad story worse, by the time your hospital gets it your competitors will have already passed you by.

We are not talking about being better at what you are—the grammar is poor but the intent is not. The discussion that your customers are begging for, the discussion they expect is about your hospital becoming what you are not.

And what does being what you are not look like?

In less than three years every hospital process, every single nonclinical function that is performed today by nonclinical employees will be performed by your patients and by prospective patients. Every process will be performed without waiting and without error and without much cost. It will performed digitally and on a device and at a time of the person’s choosing.

Your customers will carry your hospital around in the purses and briefcases. And that is how I define improving patient experience.